My dream mother

John Sutherland thought he had put the past to rest when he published his childhood memoir last year. But then his long-dead mother - who was at the heart of the book - began to invade his dreams night after night. Why had she come back?

There comes a point in life when, if you've been around long enough, you stop looking forwards and start looking backwards.

I'd reached that point in 2007. I was no longer too young to be writing my memoirs. Nor was I so distant from my childhood that I couldn't clearly recall it. Those formative years were still vividly with me; some of the wounds still oozed. A good moment, as the Frenchman said, to do some serious research into time past. Pass me the madeleine.

The result: a Misery Memoir - 250 pages of Poor John. The book (plug alert: The Boy who Loved Books) was, if not raved over by the reviewing establishment, well-enough received. In terms of stats, I'd put it at half a John Lanchester and one tenth of an Augusten Burroughs. As for Dave Pelzer - think of a number and add five zeroes. But, what the hell, my hardship was only a fraction of those superselling misery-mongers.

Truth to say, I was pleased as Punch with my book about myself. An ego trip, yes; but one that nobody, for a change, sneered at. But then came the dreams. They weren't nightmares and it would be an exaggeration to say they "haunted" me. But they were profoundly disturbing. And they kept coming, night after night. I had, it seemed, stirred up a lot of mud writing the book - woken a whole pack of sleeping dogs.

The dreams all centred on my mother - now 15 years dead. The last I saw of her was on a life-support machine (supporting, as it happened, nothing that she would have called life) paying the final price (emphysema) for the cigarettes she had resolutely puffed for 60 years. What they put in the crematorium urn, two weeks later, might just as well have been scraped up from the nearest pub ashtrays.

She had an elegant way with a gasper, typically perched between long varnished nails. She would gesture with it, leaving expressive coils of steel blue in the air, and inhale with a sexy throatiness, holding the smoke a few seconds in her mouth. Her lips would slightly pucker, as if ready for a kiss. I myself have never been able to smoke a cigarette through the whole length of my life - for the same reason I've never taken up ballet dancing: I never believed I could do it well enough. Another kind of life-support machine awaits me in the end-of-life ward.

In the dreams, she would appear, smiling, and we'd fall back into bizarrely normal conversation. Where have you been? How are you? She would touch me. In that strange, doublethink of dreams I knew she was dead, and yet believed she was alive. I would wake, sometimes trembling.

I teach in Los Angeles. It's a place where half the population are licensed estate agents and the other half are licensed shrinks. I inquired of my closest psychoanalyst friend: was this kind of dream about your mother common in men of a certain age? Very common, he said, once you start exhuming your childhood self. As it happens, it's step one on the talking/writing $250/hour cure. The royal road to the unconscious, and all that. Another LA pal, deep into alternative realities, told me more bluntly, "She doesn't like the book. She's trying to get through to you. Your mother wants to tell you that you've got it all wrong, John." I could doublethink that one, as well.

My childhood is easily summarised. It was war - the destroyer of any normal family life. My father was killed, flying warplanes, before I knew him. I would never fill his empty shoes - everyone made sure I knew that. My mother was an abnormally clever, attractive, working-class girl, destined by birth (had Hitler not happily intervened) for a lifetime of drudgery. After her tears were dry, she grabbed wartime widowhood with both hands as a heaven-sent opportunity. Like Steve McQueen in the movie, she would leap the fence into freedom from the outside lavatory and the impoverished life of the spirit that went with it.

Born Violet Maud (names she loathed), she rechristened herself Liz. Five-foot-nothing, a 14-year-old school-leaver, she got herself a job as a wartime WPC. She took on a series of officer-class Yank and British lovers, learning something from each of them - a kind of prostitution of the body in the interest of the mind. She did everything except re-marry. No more of that bondage. She would, decades later, die rich, respected, and a local JP - sitting on the bench in the town hall whose steps her kneeling mother had scrubbed, at dawn, during the bitter Depression years. It must have been a sweet feeling.

I, the only child, was in the way as she made her initial break. An infant, even one as eager to please as myself, was baggage not wanted on my mother's great adventure in life. I was shunted from family pillar to family post. The family was, as it happened, extended and took its collective responsibilities seriously - but unlovingly. Frosty aunt replaced even frostier relatives for whom there was no precise description - other than that they were, somehow, "family".

I had originally wanted to call the book Relocation, Relocation, Relocation, in witness of the pass-the-parcel treatment inflicted on me (five schools before the age of 11, for example). The publishers thought that would destine it for the property shelves in Waterstone's and instant remaindering. Hence their title, which I'm not wild about. You can love books, but unlike mothers, they'll never love you back. And that's what I most wanted. Loving.

I wasn't abused: except once, aged around 12, when some friendly pervert fellated me, between punnets, while we were out currant picking. He was imprisoned a couple of years later for doing it to another kid who, unlike me, complained (I would take any kind of shit from adults; they were, after all, in charge of life). I still feel a frisson in the groin whenever I spread Tiptree blackcurrant on my toast and trust he wasn't too brutally persecuted in prison by the paedo-hating lags and screws.

I was, though, seldom beaten, often cuffed and massively ignored. I had lots of time for reading, which was encouraged not because anyone in the family had ambitions for me, but because it rendered me "seen and not heard": the definition of a "good child".

What, I wondered, was my dream-mother trying to tell me night by night? Being a Victorianist by trade, with a soft spot for table rapping, I believed that she might, indeed, be trying to "get through". I speculated that she wanted to tell her story. The other side, from the other side. Gradually, putting myself in her place, I pieced together what the outline of her matching story might be, and how it might subvert my own, skewed version of events.

Take, for example, the following episode in my early childhood, aged around five, which I put forward in the book, nakedly inviting the reader's sympathy:

As the war dragged on, I was trailed around according to the timetable of the hour. I was "parked" (I hated that word) wherever convenient; sometimes forgotten for whole half-days or longer. Once, I recall, I was left entirely alone in the family flat for a terrible 36 hours. The colleague at the police-station whom my mother had charged to "look in" never turned up - some emergency greater than a lonely child, presumably. Meters hardly ever ran out where I was parked.

No question who you're expected to root for here. Lonely little me. And the recollection is true. I can still feel the pangs of that cold, dark, empty, bewildering, interminable solitude. It has left a scar - deeper than anything that happened in the Horkesley blackcurrant fields. True, too, is the fact that any parent abandoning their child in that way today would risk losing custody, on grounds of culpable negligence.

But cutting through the self-pity, and those smug turns of phrase, what might Liz's truth have been? If I think about it, she almost certainly wasn't out painting the town red, or enjoying a dirty weekend in Brighton over those 36 hours. She must have been on police duty. What was her primary duty? Keeping the peace, of course (necessary even in war time), but, more specifically, protecting underage and other vulnerable women from sexual abuse by the local soldiery. Such abuse is rampant in any wartime garrison town, such as Colchester, where we lived. Night after night, as I much later learned, she would be obliged to go into drinking holes (some unlicensed) and dancehalls. It was tough work and dangerous. A military man, aware that he might die very soon, does not like to be denied his final sexual pleasures. And certainly not by some jumped-up dwarf of a WPC who looked like she might be a bit of a goer herself.

The scenario that goes through my mind is as follows. A 14-year-old has been gang-raped. Someone has to take her to the hospital and gently prise out the details, before the servicemen get an emergency posting to safety (something that routinely happened with US suspects). No chance to clock off. None of my family, or family friends, had phones. On past record, I could hang on. For God's sake, there's a war on. I'd live. A cuddle and a bag of sweets would put it all right.

Of course, none of this could be explained to a five-year-old. And by the time I could make sense of it the whole thing would have been water long under the bridge and wholly forgotten. I, of course, remembered. Part of me never forgave my mother: it symbolised unlovingness. Indelibly - like a tattoo on the heart.

If I think about it, I believe that something like the rape scenario I hypothesise above could actually have happened. I should, at least, give the idea houseroom. Since the dreams, I've done a lot of thinking on the subject. At every point of "my" story, I can see that there is plausibly an alternative story: a case for the defence. There always is: every family is Rashomon, that classic Japanese movie, where four involved parties have four quite irreconcilable accounts of the rape and murder they witnessed in a forest. Truth? It depends where you're standing.

Without getting into the fraught legal conflict between Constance Briscoe, author of the memoir Ugly, and her mother, I can quite believe that in such situations both women, alleged abuser and alleged abusee, might be telling what, to them, is the God's honest truth. But, at important junctures, their narratives will never intersect. There are two truths at work.

The laureate of the dysfunctional family, Augusten Burroughs (interviewed in these pages last week), has a new book out, A Wolf at the Table. It's subtitled A Memoir of My Father. That subtitle could as well read, "My Father - What a Bastard!"

Burroughs' memoir opens with the child ("Chris Robison", as he then was) running in terror through the woods outside the family home. "If my father caught me," says the first sentence, "he would cut my neck." Indeed, it transpires, bad dad would do just that. To the bone. The memoirist's father is a homicidal sadist and a violent drunk. It's a wonder that Burroughs survived to tell the tale. He's been running through the woods of life, one apprehends, ever since.

But, as the New York Times (April 24) reports, "Mr Robison's friends and colleagues saw him quite differently": he was the chairman of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst; he died at the age of 70 in 2005. People who knew him there, described Mr Robison as "an almost motherly figure who looked after everyone in the department and was very kind".

"Such sharply contrasting views," the Times sagely predicts, "are sure to renew questions about the truthfulness of memoirs in general, and Mr Burroughs' in particular." On a critical episode in A Wolf at the Table, Burroughs' mother recalls: "I should say we have different memories."

Ah: "memoir truth" and "different memories". Deep waters. In a new foreword to the latest edition of A Million Little Pieces, James Frey's memoir of his experiences during treatment for alcohol and drug addiction, Frey excuses his porkies by reference to what he calls "subjective truth". What you feel when you're going through the ordeal, Frey would have us believe, is more "factual" than what thesmokinggun.com pedantically records as actually having happened.

Where, then, can we look for the "truth" in those primal family relationships with our fathers and mothers - the dubious accounts of which so fascinate us? Dreams, I suspect, are as good a place to start as anywhere. My dreams, I'm glad to say, have stopped. I'd like to think because I've made my peace with Liz. Doubtless she'll let me know, next time we meet.

· The paperback version of The Boy Who Loved Books by John Sutherland is published by John Murray at £8.99. To order a copy for £8.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875